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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Sulla80, post: 3699955, member: 99456&quot;]Rob - <a href="http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/631/1/Binder2.pdf" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/631/1/Binder2.pdf" rel="nofollow">this</a> article might interest you - which I think does a nice review of the Distributio with some interpretation.</p><p><br /></p><p>some humor from the opening quote of Horace:</p><p><i>&quot;To the Greeks the Muse gave intellect and well-rounded speech; they are greedy only for praise. Roman children, with lengthy calculations, learn to divide the as into a hundred parts&quot; </i></p><p><br /></p><p>a dry observation:</p><p><i>&quot;The reason why some subdivisions </i>[of the as]<i> have signs and names and others do not, is simply not given: Maecianus observes that, for instance, the as could be divided into eleven equal parts, but it is not.&quot;</i></p><p><br /></p><p>more relevant to this thread: </p><p><i>&quot;The as is subdivided into halves (semisses), thirds (trientes), fourths (quadrantes), sixths (sextantes), eighths (sescunciae), ninths (unciae duae sextulae) and twelfths (unciae) – the “elements, as it were’ of the first division (distributio).&quot;</i></p><p><br /></p><p>and a comment in support [USER=98035]@Finn235[/USER] &#039;s thought above:</p><p><i>In practice, a lot of the money that the Distributio discusses only existed in the form of signs and names. It has been observed that small units of currency would have been little used in antiquity because the as ‘would have been adequate for many of the purchases of everyday life’.</i></p><p><br /></p><p>I am still left with the question of &quot;uncia&quot; of &quot;chalcos&quot; for the OP coin.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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